The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for automatically detecting and locating equipment within an equipment rack.
Whether a small enterprise has electronic equipment in one room or a much larger enterprise has electronic equipment in many rooms in various facilities all over the world, each of these enterprises need to maintain an accurate inventory of the equipment in their facilities. Having a reliable inventory of the electronic equipment is a time consuming operation and is generally required for several energy management optimizations, such as cooling, power management, or the like. While current solutions of tracking inventory include the use of barcodes or radio frequency identification (RFID), these current solutions may have numerous issues or problems, such as requiring a separate database to associate barcode or tags to the electronic equipment, an additional cost of having to tag each piece of electronic equipment, human intervention of having to verify position or location of each piece of electronic equipment within an equipment rack, keeping track of electronic equipment that has been removed from an equipment rack, or determining whether space is available in an equipment rack.